Over the last few days as we’ve been discussing Francesca Hong’s campaign, Thanksgiving abolition and “defunding the police,” I’ve made the same argument a number of times — most recently with TPM Reader AB whose email dispatch you can read below. I wanted to share it with you because it informs my way of understanding these things.
After Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary last year, there were so many powerful people eager to take him down and so many ways it would be easy to do it. It’s very, very challenging to navigation the transition from a lefty/social democratic/identity politics milieu to a broader society-wide electorate. Obviously New York City is a very blue city. It’s not Wisconsin or Michigan, let alone Texas or Ohio. But the same general point remains. It’s an incredibly challenging needle to thread, one that requires immense, innate political skill. Mamdani fielded all the standard attacks, some fair, some very unfair, and again and again he was able to finesse them. This, to me, was the biggest signal. He’s an immense political talent. Some have it; most don’t; he does.
Of course I have my own issues with him on Israel/Palestine. But even on that issue, perhaps especially on that issue, I saw how he was able to navigate a super challenging electoral thicket. Again and again.
Which brings me to Francesca Hong.
I’ve had a lot of people tell me the “abolish Thanksgiving” thing is a fake issue. No, it’s not. Or if it is, it’s the kind of “fake issue” that people frequently end up losing elections over. As a voter, when I give you my vote or my support, I’m giving you or loaning an asset, a valuable one. I want to know you’re going to take care of it, use it for an important purpose, not piss it away over anything stupid. When I saw Hong’s responses about her cancel Thanksgiving tweet, even with relatively friendly interviewers, I thought, she’s not ready for prime time. She lacks the finesse and political skill for a general election. No, I’m really not worried that we’re going to lose Thanksgiving. And if we somehow land in an alternative universe where a majority of the American people think we should abolish Thanksgiving, I’m not going to be hugely broken up about it. But my vote and support are valuable assets. I need to know it’s in good hands, skillful and trustworthy hands. If you didn’t say anything weird in 2020, great. If you did, find a way to make it work. If you can’t find a way not to die on the hill of Thanksgiving abolition then I need a different candidate. And that example signaled to me that she’d fare equally poorly on a much more cutting issue of “defund the police.” Hong either lacked the political skills or deft enough antennae to understand how people outside the DSA/left-progressive bubble think. (And yes, I’m also in a bubble. We all are.)
Maybe you say that the fact we’re even talking about this is an example of how our politics is broken. It is. But this isn’t an example of that.
Most people don’t pay a lot of attention to politics. The great majority lack the time and technical knowledge to evaluate complex public policy questions. What a candidate can do is communicate a clear set of values and priorities. After that, a huge amount of the electoral process is governed by a series of signifiers by which voters decide “I can understand this person” and “I think they can understand me and my life situation.” A huge amount of political skill is a candidate’s ability to open these channels with people who are quite different from them, establish what we’d now call parasocial channels of mutual understanding. If you’re going to stumble on something like Thanksgiving abolition … well, that’s just too silly a thing to stumble on when so much is at stake.
